Page:The Seven Seas (Kipling, 1896).djvu/161

 AN AMERICAN

'If the Led Striker call it a strike,

Or the papers call it a war,

They know not much what I am like,

Nor what he is, My Avatar.'

Through many roads, by me possessed,

He shambles forth in cosmic guise;

He is the Jester and the Jest,

And he the Text himself applies.

The Celt is in his heart and hand,

The Gaul is in his brain and nerve;

Where, cosmopolitanly planned,

He guards the Redskin's dry reserve.

His easy unswept hearth he lends

From Labrador to Guadeloupe;

Till, elbowed out by sloven friends,

He camps, at sufferance, on the stoop.

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